In article , Robert Casey
writes:

Phil Kane wrote:

On 18 Jul 2003 05:17:42 -0700, N2EY wrote:

OTOH, millions of young children today are "forced" to learn how to do
basic arithmetic even though inexpensive calculators have been around
for decades.

What "learning"? Go into your local fast-food place or grocery
store and see the blank look on the clerk's face if s/he has to make
change and the register is not working.....

Yeah. Even if the register is working, some get confused when, for a
bill of $5.72, I
hand them a ten and a single. "I was hoping to get back a five and some
coins"....

For some reason I don't encounter that sort of thing around here.

Back in the mid sixties, in grammar school we spent a huge amount of
time on arithemitic chores like long division. Back then before calculators
and
home computers, it probably made some sense to learn how to do this by hand.
Nowadays, they probably should teach some of this, and also get kids to
be able to make judgements of an answer is wildly wrong, or reasonable
(like did I hit the "x" key when I wanted "+"?).

They do, at least in the local public schools.

My grammar school "taught to the test". We had yearly achievement
tests (computer graded multiple choice, somewhat similar to the SAT)
and they wanted good scores. So stuff like creative writing was not taught
(doesn't show on the test). No music either. Anyway, if you had some
wits about yourself, a computer graded arithemitic test with multiple
choice answers is a lot easier than one the teacher grades (if it's an
addition problem, all you need add is the right-most colunm and then
you pick the answer with the matching least significant digit).

Ugh.

The point still remains - should the whole subject of basic arithmetic simply
be dropped because we now have calculators?

73 de Jim, N2EY